The limited-duration articulatory store which has been proposed as the basis of the memory span could involve either a playback or a production mechanism. In order to compare these, immediate serial recall was studied with auditorily-presented lists of digits with durations of 120–300 msec and pauses of 60–240 msec. Memory span declined for decreasing item duration, an effect largely attributable to loss of intelligibility. The results suggest that memory span depends on an active process rather than on passive playback of the memory trace.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AaronsonD. (1967). Temporal factors in perception and short-term memory. Psychological Bulletin, 67(2), 130–144.
2.
AyresT. (1987). Immediate recall of time-compressed synthetic speech. Paper presented to the meeting of the American Psychological Association, New York.
3.
BaddeleyA.HitchG. (1974). Working memory. In BowerG. (Ed.), Recent advances in learning and motivationVol. VIII. New York: Academic Press.
4.
BaddeleyA.LewisV.VallarG. (1984). Exploring the articulatory loop. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 36A, 233–252.
5.
BaddeleyA.ThomsonN.BuchananM. (1975). Word length and the structure of short-term memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14, 575–589.
6.
BroadbentD. (1984). The Maltese cross: A new simplistic model for memory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 55–94.
7.
DempsterF. (1981). Memory span: Sources of individual and developmental differences. Psychological Bulletin, 89(1), 63–100.
KlappS. (1976). Short-term memory as a response preparation state. Memory & Cognition, 4(6), 721–729.
10.
MillerG. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.
11.
Naveh-BenjaminM.AyresT. (1986). Digit span, reading rate, and linguistic relativity. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38A, 739–751.
12.
RoweE.RoweG. (1976). Stimulus suffix effects with speech and nonspeech sounds. Memory & Cognition, 4(2), 128–131.
13.
SalameP.BaddeleyA. (1982). Disruption of short-term memory by unattended speech: Implications for the structure of working memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21, 150–164.
14.
StandingL.BondB.SmithP.IselyC. (1980). Is the immediate memory span determined by subvocalization rate?British Journal of Psychology, 71, 525–539.
